Thursday, December 20, 2007

LOLscience

If you know about LOLcats, you can skip this paragraph. For the uninitiated, LOLcats is a sort of warped inside joke for internet users. The basic idea is to post photos of cats, normally in slightly bizarre situations, with huge captions (generally in Impact font) laced with diabolically bad grammar. The classic image is of a cat staring hopefully at the camera and asking "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" There are several inside jokes, such as the unhappy walrus, that it helps to be familiar with: this article gives a handy summary. It's also no longer limited to cats, or indeed to animals.

These are our best efforts, but we think they're only the start of a vast epidemic of timewasting. So, send us your lolscience pics, or submit them to the Flickr group. We'll do a round-up of the best ones in a few weeks.

Lastly, we'd like to thank reader Nicki Rose, who pointed out this delightful image on the official icanhascheezburger site. We're slightly disappointed that the caption isn't in lolspeak, but we find it rather charming. And to the person who created it: WE KNOE WER U LIV. WE WILL HAS R REVENGE.

... or not. As you point out, this wastes time. LOLCthulhu is pretty funny, but only because cats are entirely unfunny, whether one is expected to "LOL" (wildly improbable, in the absence of a developmental disability) at their ungrammatical cheeseburger-related desires, or not.

At the risk of being bopped over the head by yossarian, I'm going to out myself. I'm the guilty party responsible for the Rise of the Dreaded LOLScience.

I also plead guilty to being way too amused by LOLstuff, maybe because it's so silly and idiotic.

Whatever. A couple of months ago I tagged four of my flickr posts with "LOLScience," and just for the hell of it I did a search a couple of days later for the tag and my four were the only ones that came up. So I said, "I can fix that," and set up the flickr group.

When New Scientist joined a couple of weeks later, it shocked my socks off! I figured I'd pull in a few scientists, a few scientists-by-training like myself, and a few curious LOLsters from among flickr members, but that was about all. If New Scientist has picked it up and run with it, that's fine by me!